


Done Gone

by irrelevant



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vegas, Episode Tag, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-22
Updated: 2010-05-22
Packaged: 2017-10-09 15:45:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/89009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irrelevant/pseuds/irrelevant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vegas fic tag.  Slashy if you want to see it that way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Done Gone

He's alone when he opens his eyes. His pulse is electronic repetition in his ears, catheters and wires grown out of a hundred purple black aches. Sterile white around him, backwashed anesthesia sick-sweet on his tongue and his brain does split-second what the fuck before precisely what the fuck slams into him like a .45 slug.

Clarity is total and brief; swells with the pain then ebbs away, saline and slow-drip erosion. He goes with it, lets it roll him over until he's looking up from below, bubbled air rushing from his mouth, his nose, and he can't breathe with his lungs this hurting full. When it comes, blackout is nothing short of beautiful.

The second time he surfaces he stays conscious long enough to register a woman's face and voice. She looks down at him, her eyebrows arched surprise. "Detective?" she says, and he asks, _how, where, water?_ "I'm sorry," she says. "I don't understand." Then he's gone again.

\--

Later, he remembers the morgue. Hands white in latex resting on desiccated skin. Her ponytail bobs as she walks past him down a hall, heels clicking, pausing when someone says, _Jennifer._

"Jennifer," John rasps and she smiles at him, close-lipped.

"I am sometimes." Her hands aren't gloved now. They brush his skin, warm and impersonal and John focuses on them, on manicured nails and smooth palms. Plain gold circles her left ring finger and he thinks he's seen its match on a different hand.

"Doctor… McKay?" Shot in the dark. It goes wide.

"That would be Rodney," she tells him, her voice weirdly flat. "You spoke with him two days ago. I'm Dr. Keller."

"Right," John mutters, and the world fuzzes out.

\--

Not-really-FBI guy shows up the day he's discharged. He's pulling boots on over bare feet and staring at the laundered wreck of his last white button-down. There's a tap on the door and he figures it's his walking papers, and in a way he's right. He says, "Yeah, come on," and the guy—Woolworth? Wooly?—walks in, closing the door behind him.

"Detective Sheppard," he says, and John says, "Not at the moment."

The guy clears his throat and looks at a point on the wall somewhere over John's shoulder. "Well. I suppose that's—well."

John figures he's embarrassed him enough. This time he signs everything and in return, he gets keys.

Car keys.

\--

All things considered—and John's consideration includes life-sucking aliens—a late '90s-model sedan is the next thing to salvation, salvation itself being two nine millimeter handguns in the glove compartment. Lying on top of them in a manila envelope is a precisely folded sheet of paper wrapped around a bank card.

>   
> _Grey is much less eye-catching than red, and by the way, is painting targets on your back a hobby of yours in every universe? Ammo under the front passenger seat. Sorry about The Man in Black. Most of him didn't make it._   
> 

"Son of a bitch," John says. He's never seen McKay's handwriting but he'd bet the contents of his new bank account that he's looking at it right now.

He shoves the card into his back pocket, tosses the wadded up envelope and paper on the passenger seat and slides behind the wheel. It's not American muscle, but there's leg room to spare.

Son of a fucking bitch.

\--

Patrick Sheppard's 1916 Standing Liberty quarter is the only thing of material value John's held on to for longer than a few months. He's not sure why he hasn't sold it yet. Not like the old man would have cared. It's ridden John's hip pocket for ten years and it rides with him all the way down I-15 to San Diego. He's out of Escondido by 1600; at 1614 he takes the Kearny Villa exit. He pulls over onto the shoulder and sits on the sedan's hood, back against the windshield, forearms resting on bent knees.

Southern California haze is like no other pollution, anywhere. It tickles the back of his throat, dry and metallic. He drops his arms, flattens his palms against the car hood and watches a ground crew pre-flight two F-35s.

The base was Navy first, Marine after, no Air Force connection, but to a jet-jockey Miramar is more than the military branch occupying it. Pure flight, maybe. The dream of free-fallen speed made tangible.

John pulls out the quarter and rolls it between his fingers; rubs his thumb over raised minting. Heads, he sticks around for a while, kills off summer on a board. Tails is Baja. Or maybe he'll just point himself towards Tijuana and keep going.

Hazed sun hits spun silver, there's a puff of dust, and Lady Liberty is face up in the dirt.

John thinks, _Ocean Beach it is_. That's about what he can afford if he wants the smell of the ocean and a year's grace before the money runs out. He pushes himself off the hood and picks a few months' worth of rent up out of the dirt.

"Sorry," he tells Liberty. "Wrong lady."

Luck is a jealous bitch.

\--

Whoever's at the door doesn't bother with the bell. They knock three times fast and sharp, twice slow after that. John's not expecting anyone. He stopped looking over his shoulder two months ago.

He opens the door the way he hasn't since Vegas: shoulder to the wall, the butt of his gun sweat-slippery in his hand.

"Paranoid much?" McKay says. "Or did you finally locate your misplaced sense of self-preservation?"

John lets his pent-up breath go. He eases the safety on, nudges the door wider and scowls at McKay. "What do you want?"

"I was in the neighborhood, thought I'd drop by," McKay says, rolling his eyes. "What do you think I want?" They stare at each other—McKay impatient, John wary—and then McKay snaps, "Are you going to let me in or do you want to do this out here?"

John steps back without answering, the Sig leading his 'after you' arm sweep. McKay brushes past him and John's sure he hears the guy sniff like he smells something bad. John shuts the door. He shoves the gun into the holster hanging off the couch and then he turns around and McKay is right there, pushing something at him. "Hold this."

Bottle-green glass and metal rimming, it looks like one of those baked, fake stained-glass Christmas ornaments kids make in grade school. He leaves his hands where they are, loose at his sides. "I signed."

"Yes, I'm sure you did, but that's Woolsey's fetish, not mine. I don't care what you sign or have signed, I already told you. I know—"

"Everything, right?" John says, and McKay's mouth curls up and in.

"Just take it, Sheppard."

He's pretty sure McKay is going to be in his apartment all day if he doesn't take the dumb thing, so he does, and that's when he realizes he was wrong. Not glass and not green. Not anything from anywhere around here. Just... glowy.

And blue. Really blue.

"Do I have your attention?"

John sits down. Lucky for him, his ass hits the arm of the couch. "Yeah," he says, staring at the thing glowing against his palm. "Talk," which should be easy for McKay, his mouth practically runs on automatic, but now he's got John where he wants him he seems at a loss. He starts to speak then doesn't; shoves his hands into his pockets instead. He walks the length of the room and back, stops in front of John and says without preamble, "You've seen the chair. I already explained the alternate universe phenomenon. The other you, the one I met—his genetic code allows him to activate and use the chair, among other things."

John jiggles his hand. "Like this."

McKay lifts his chin and meets John's eyes. "Exactly like that."

"Well, that clears things up," except that it doesn't and the glowy stuff is getting old really fast, and "Guess for now, nothing is later."

For some reason, McKay finds that amusing. His mouth curves crooked and he says, "You have no idea."

"Try me," John says, and McKay outright grins—holy shit, that's weird—at him.

"Believe me, I will."

John turns the not-ornament over. The back is the same as the front, just smoother. "Better than a coin."

"I'm not even going to pretend that made sense. Think off and let's go." McKay is already halfway out the door; John snags his sleeve as he blows by, getting a glare for his efforts and, "I don't have time for your freak-out and incidentally, neither do you—we have a 3:30 flight," but John has McKay turned back around and John's got McKay's number, yeah he does.

He yanks McKay closer, shifts his grip to McKay's wrist and notices a white line where four months ago there was gold. He looks back up at McKay and, "I'm not your new lab rat," he says. McKay snorts rudely.

"Don't flatter yourself. Good lab rats are hard to come by, you're merely…"

"Your turn-on."

The look on McKay's face is indescribable. Best thing John's seen in years. "Do you have any idea how sorry I'm going to make you?"

"Yeah," John says. "I do."


End file.
